Birth Anniversary of Arna Bontemps

Arna Wendell Bontemps, the American writer who depicted the lives and struggles of black Americans was born on October 13, 1902. After graduating from Pacific Union College, Angwin, California, in 1923, Bontemps taught in New York and elsewhere. His poetry began to appear in the influential black magazines Opportunity and Crisis in the mid-1920s. His first novel, God Sends Sunday was published in 1931.

Bontemps also wrote many nonfiction works on black American history for younger readers and edited several anthologies of black American poetry and folklore. Among the latter are Father of the Blues (1941), W.C. Handy’s compositions; The Poetry of the Negro (1949) and The Book of Negro Folklore (1958), both with Langston Hughes; American Negro Poetry (1963); and Great Slave Narratives (1969).